et orior
by Hinotorihime
Summary: Oh you talk about heaven, you talk of resurrection, and starving I bare my resurrected teeth at you but you can't satisfy me either. Revenant: one who rises; ravenous: to devour without being sated. We rise like a flame and consume like a flame and maybe one day we'll die like a flame, always wanting more. Never enough. [gdl trio. vampire au.]


She didn't know anything except that she was hungry.

It was a hot, angry hunger, like grabbing her spine and twisting it, and she whimpered as she walked.

Her feet hurt from walking and her skin ached from the bright sunlight and there was nothing inside her but the hunger. She wanted to claw herself open and suck herself dry and fill her stomach until she burst open in a cloud of silver and red.

She walked and walked. Her bare feet stumbled and blistered on the pavement.

"What's your name?" said the brown-haired man, bending down to look her in the eye.

She was so _hungry_.

"I'll call you Natalija," he said, picking her up into thin, strong arms and leaning her head against his bony shoulder.

* * *

The brown-haired man had said his name was Tolvydas, but Natalija called him Tolys, because that was what Raivis whose name was really Raimondas called him. No one in the house was called by their really-name, even her: Tolys called her Nata, and Raivis called her Tasha.

Raivis was not like her and Tolys. He was human, but Tolys had been very firm that Raivis was not for eating. Raivis took care of the animals, because the animals didn't like her or Tolys—except for the wolves, who were not for eating either.

Nata didn't like eating animals. It didn't fill her up. She was always hungry, always, even after two whole pigs she still wasn't full, would crack the bones open to gnaw on the marrow, licking away every bit of the salty sponge that she could reach with her small red tongue.

She never said anything about it to Tolys. She thought, looking at the thin sharp lines of his face, that maybe he was always hungry too.

* * *

There weren't any mirrors in the house, but Raivis liked small fiddly machines and rigged up a camera that if she was patient and didn't move too much could build up a slightly blurry image of her. He hung the best ones up in the hallway, so that when she walked through the house she knew she was being watched by her own dark, pupil-less eyes. The well out back, that Raivis worried about her going near but Tolys said not to mind it because drowning wouldn't kill her and maybe if she fell in it would teach her caution, was so deep she couldn't imagine there was a bottom, and that was what her eyes looked like. Tolys's were different: more like the shifting shadows under trees, where wolves and foxes and serpents dragged their kills, and his hair put her in mind of turned-over gravedirt, nothing like her moon- and starlight-coloured braids.

(Raivis's eyes were blue, and boring.)

* * *

Sometimes Tolys brought humans home and she would hold the pillow over her head so she couldn't smell it. Once—the first time—she had gone to his room and knocked on the door and he'd opened it with his eyes burning cold and blood smeared across his cheeks and throat and nose and chin.

"I want some," she demanded.

His long nails dug into the doorframe and suddenly Raivis was behind her pulling her into his own bedroom and locking the door and asking frantically what the _hell_ she thought she was doing and Nata felt very tiny and afraid, thinking of the hunger, and Tolys's eyes, and the sweet-smelling blood and the crescent-shaped nailmarks in the wood.

So at night she just lay in bed and felt the aching hollow hunger like a pit dug through under her ribcage. Sometimes she pressed on her side trying to make it go away.

* * *

Tolys and Raivis both liked to read, which meant Nata had to learn too. They would sit in the parlor, all together, Nata on Raivis's lap so he could help her with the big words and so that his warm human body could sink heat through her papery skin. Good heat, nice-smelling heat, not sunburn-heat, like there would be from a fire, and he pulled a soft wool blanket over them both to keep it in.

Sometimes she sat on Tolys's lap, instead. Not for warmth, because Tolys was like her and didn't have a warm soft body: all cold, and bony wrists, and jutting ribcage. Her thin spine fit almost exactly into the hollow under his sternum.

 _Pretty girl_ , he called her, and kissed her forehead with white lips. It felt familiar, right and wrong both, like maybe she'd had a brother or a father before who had done this. Human family with human blood and human warmth.

* * *

On the anniversary of coming to live with them, Tolys came home with a cloth-wrapped bundle and dropped it at Nata's feet.

"I brought you a treat," he said.

Nata poked at the blanket until it revealed a flushed, unconscious female face.

"For eating?" she asked hopefully.

Tolys shrugged carelessly. "For whatever you like," he said, and went into his bedroom.

Later, she thought that she oughtn't to have made such a mess, but she couldn't help it, as soon as she bit down the hunger had washed over her so strongly she couldn't _think_ and there wasn't anything left now not even bones. Just stains on her favourite dress, and a sickly rotting smell where some of the mess had gotten on the wallpaper. Raivis quietly helped her clean her face and hands and she found some bleach for the floor and wall and Tolys got her a new dress—and a knife, which she promptly used to cover the kitchen table in jaggedy lines like teeth until he sighed and took it away again.

She still didn't feel full.


End file.
